Generosity Day – ready to launch

Just three days until Generosity Day and all the pieces are in place – so now is the time to start spreading the word!

The “why” of generosity and of Generosity Day is something I continue to explore for myself, and I’ll share more thoughts in the next few days.  I just posted a piece on Fast Company’s FastCo.Exist as part of their wonderful generosity series – and in the act of writing that I learned something about what’s at the core of this for me.  What I realized is that when this all started, when I first jumped in to my generosity experiment:

“…I knew almost nothing about generosity. I’d never worried about it, cultivated it, practiced it, or thought about how regularly I failed to be generous. And suddenly I felt a huge disconnect. Suddenly I realized that I could never make the change I wanted to see in the world using half of my brain and none of my heart.”

To me that’s the starting point, and it’s what I keep returning to.  I’m trying to understand what a practice of generosity means in social change work.  I’m trying to cultivate generosity in me because, paradoxically, it is core to so many decisions I’ve made in my life and yet at times it doesn’t come naturally to me.  So I work at it, I try to understand it, I decide to practice it even when it does not come naturally…and slowly, day by day and action by action (but never in a straight line, never just in one direction) I change.

If I have one wish for Generosity Day this year it’s that it be a day of action.  What would it mean to have a million generous acts happen around the world?  It would be transformational.

To help make that happen, this year it’s easier than ever to share your story.  There’s amazing momentum building already on www.facebook.com/generosityday.  People are already tweeting with the #generosityday hashtag – things they’re doing, ways they’ve been touched by generosity, and just to spread the word.  I hope you’ll be a part of it.

Just three days to go.  Can you hear the distant rumble?  That’s the momentum building.